Visual Translation - (Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies) by Anne D Hedeman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Visual Translation breaks new ground in the study of French manuscripts, contributing to the fields of French humanism, textual translation, and the reception of the classical tradition in the first half of the fifteenth century.

While the prominence and quality of illustrations in French manuscripts have attracted attention, their images have rarely been studied systematically as components of humanist translation. Anne D. Hedeman fills this gap by studying the humanist book production closely supervised by Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebègue for courtly Parisian audiences in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Hedeman explores how visual translation works in a series of unusually densely illuminated manuscripts associated with Laurent and Lebègue circa 1404-54. These manuscripts cover both Latin texts, such as Statius's Thebiad and Achilleid, Terence's Comedies, and Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline and Jurguthine War, and French translations of Cicero's De senectute, Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium and Decameron, and Bruni's De bello Punico primo. Illuminations constitute a significant part of these manuscripts' textual apparatus, which helped shape access to and interpretation of the texts for a French audience. Hedeman considers them as a group and reveals Laurent's and Lebègue's growing understanding of visual rhetoric and its ability to visually translate texts originating in a culture removed in time or geography for medieval readers who sought to understand them. The book discusses what happens when the visual cycles so carefully devised in collaboration with libraries and artists by Laurent and Lebègue escaped their control in a process of normalization. With over 180 color images, this major reference book will appeal to students and scholars of French, comparative literature, art history, history of the book, and translation studies.

Review Quotes

"Hedeman's book enhances our understanding of literary and manuscript culture in the highest French aristocratic circles, showing the wealth of knowledge and intellectual activity produced through the dissemination of classical and Italian texts and culture."--French Studies

"A very engaging and abundantly illustrated book. ...The 'elite illustrated subset of humanist manuscripts' that Hedeman brilliantly presents to the reader thus reveals once again the dynamic interaction among their princely audiences, the various craftsmen who contributed to their execution, the two humanists who supervised their production, and the texts they transmit." --Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures

"The answers Hedeman discovered and analyzed in the book offer insight into aspects of humanist thought and of translation that were specific to the early 15th century and other aspects that are timeless." --The University of Kansas

"While the prominence and quality of illustrations in French manuscripts have attracted attention, their images have rarely been studied systematically as components of humanist translation. Anne D. Hedeman fills this gap by studying the humanist book production closely supervised by Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebègue for courtly Parisian audiences in the first half of the fifteenth century." --RMBLF.be

"This fascinating book treats a group of illustrated manuscripts from the early 15th century produced in or around Paris. . . . Some manuscripts . . . were translated into French, but this deeply learned book uses 'visual translation' to signify the use of images to enrich the text for readers in a very different culture, making the past 'resonate' with the present. . . wonderfully illustrated with nearly 200 color images of miniatures and important texts." --Choice

"Visual Translation will give scholars across the board not only a new understanding of the place of French humanists in the shaping and accessibility of manuscripts whose creation they oversaw but also insight into the complex and integral role that they played in formulating the programs of illumination that would go on to define these texts for generations." --Elizabeth Morrison, editor of Book of Beasts

About the Author

Anne D. Hedeman is the Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas. She is the author and co-editor of a number of books, including Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book: The Power of Paratexts.